Known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns

"These means are so ineffective, so exiguous in their poverty that, if that were the whole machinery, we could know little or nothing or only achieve a great blur of confusion." — Sri Aurobindo

The philosopher John Searle took it upon himself to defend direct realism (a.k.a. naïve or common-sense realism).¹ His argument begins by invoking the fact that we are able to communicate with each other using publicly available meanings in a public language. For this to work, we have to assume the existence of publicly available objects of reference:

So, for example, when I use the expression “this table” I have to assume that you understand the expression in the same way that I intend it. I have to assume we are both referring to the same table, and when you understand me in my utterance of “this table” you take it as referring to the same object you refer to in this context in your utterance of “this table.” [p. 276]

The implication then is that

you and I share a perceptual access to one and the same object. And that is just another way of saying that I have to presuppose that you and I are both seeing or otherwise perceiving the same public object. But that public availability of that public world is precisely the direct realism that I am here attempting to defend.

If Searle were right, as he seems convinced he is, then everyone else would be wrong: “the philosophy of mind is unique among contemporary philosophical subjects, in that all of the most famous and influential theories are false.” [p. 2] But Searle is wrong, on two counts. For one, direct realism, if true, would leave nothing worthwhile to be said about the ontological implications of quantum mechanics, and this is not the case. For another, direct realism, if true, would leave nothing worthwhile to be said about the mutual inclusion of consciousness and matter (i.e., the simultaneous presence of consciousness in matter and of matter in consciousness), and this too is not the case.

As regards quantum mechanics: compare his painfully simplistic claim that “the objects around you, the chairs and tables, houses and trees ... are entirely made of the particles described by atomic physics” [p. 3], with the conclusion at which Brigitte Falkenburg arrives after a painstaking philosophical examination of contemporary particle physics²:

Quantum physics investigates nothing but phenomena in a classical environment.... The bottom–up explanation of the classical macroscopic world in terms of electrons, light quanta, quarks, and some other particles remains an empty promise. Any attempt at constructing a particle or field ontology gives rise to a non-relational account of a subatomic reality made up of independent substances and causal agents. But any known approach of this type is either at odds with the principles of relativistic quantum theory or with the assumption that quantum measurements give rise to actual events in a classical world.... [T]o our present knowledge subatomic reality is not a micro-world on its own but a part of empirical reality that exists relative to the macroscopic world, in given experimental arrangements and well-defined physical contexts outside the laboratory.

As regards consciousness: Searle makes light of the explanatory gap between neural processes and conscious experience, claiming³ that “[t]he ‘mind-body problem’ is no more a real problem than the ‘stomach-digestion problem’.”

Consciousness is a biological property like digestion or photosynthesis. Now why isn’t that screamingly obvious to anybody who’s had any education? And I think the answer is these twin traditions. On the one hand there’s God, the soul and immortality that says it’s really not part of the physical world, and then there is the almost as bad tradition of scientific materialism that says it’s not a part of the physical world. They both make the same mistake, they refuse to take consciousness on its own terms as a biological phenomenon like digestion, or photosynthesis, or mitosis, or miosis, or any other biological phenomenon.⁴

All of this while at the same time admitting that “we don't have anything like a clear idea of how brain processes, which are publicly observable, objective phenomena, could cause anything as peculiar as inner, qualitative states of awareness or sentience”.⁵ While this may cause the presence of consciousness to appear as a mystery, Searle clings to the belief that “our sense of mystery will be removed when and if we have an answer to the causal question”.⁶ Karl Popper and John Eccles⁷ have referred to blind faith of this kind as “promissory materialism,” and Hilary Putnam⁸ has remarked that “[s]aying ‘Science may someday find a way to reduce consciousness (or reference, or whatever) to physics’ is, here and now, saying that science may someday do we-know-not-what we-know-not-how”.

Peter Strawson, whose career spanned the second half of the twentieth century, had something more interesting to say. In a famous essay titled “Perception and it objects”,⁹ Strawson imagines himself requesting a non-philosophical observer to describe his current visual experience. The observer might reply: “I see the red light of the setting sun filtering through the black and thickly clustered branches of the elms; I see the dappled deer grazing in groups on the vivid green grass....” But this is not what Strawson wants.

So we explain to him. We explain that we want him to amend his account so that, without any sacrifice of fidelity to the experience as actually enjoyed, it nevertheless sheds all that heavy load of commitment to propositions about the world which was carried by the description he gave. We want an account which confines itself strictly within the limits of the subjective episode, an account which would remain true even if he had seen nothing of what he claimed to see, even if he had been subject to total illusion.

The observer is quick in the uptake. He does not start talking about lights and colors, patches and patterns, for he sees that to do so would be to falsify the character of the experience he is actually enjoying. He says instead:

I understand. I've got to cut out of my report all commitment to propositions about independently existing objects. Well, the simplest way to do this, while remaining faithful to the character of the experience as actually enjoyed, is to put my previous report in inverted commas.... Thus: “I had a visual experience such as it would have been natural to describe by saying that I saw, etc.… were it not for the obligation to exclude commitment to propositions about independently existing objects.” In this way I use the perceptual claim — the claim it was natural to make in the circumstances — in order to characterize my experience, without actually making the claim. I render the perceptual judgement internal to the characterization of the experience without actually asserting the content of the judgement. And this is really the best possible way of characterizing the experience.

Now this is important. In order to adequately describe his experience, the observer cannot retreat to talking about color patches and shapes. He cannot let go of objects. Nor does he need to. He only needs to let go of objects existing independently of experience. To put the facts of the matter in somewhat paradoxical terms, objects experienced by him as external are internal to his experience. If “sense data” or “sense impressions” are what is given us in experience, then our dependence on a realist descriptive scheme (i.e., one that refers to external objects) is, in Strawson’s own words, “something given with the given.”

Even more is “given with the given.” For we also have the virtually incorrigible sense that objects are not only perceived but also account, or are responsible, for their being perceived.

For we think of perception as a way, indeed the basic way, of informing ourselves about the world of independently existing things: we assume, that is to say, the general reliability of our perceptual experiences; and that assumption is the same as the assumption of a general causal dependence of our perceptual experiences on the independently existing things we take them to be of.

Searle not only believes in the general reliability of our perceptual experiences but also thinks that there is a valid scientific explanation of the causal dependence of perceptual experiences on independently existing things. We have seen in this post what Hilary Putnam¹⁰ thought of this explanation: “An ‘explanation’ that involves connections of a kind we do not understand at all … and concerning which we have not even the sketch of a theory is an explanation through something more obscure than the phenomenon to be explained.” What contemporary science lacks across the board is causal explanations without unbridgeable gaps. What it has instead is irreducible correlations, and these come in four types.

• Type I is exemplified by the correlated behaviors of electrons in two antennas, one which is said to emit electromagnetic radiation and another which is said to receive it. Correlations of this type are also implicated when Bob looks at a green apple: those that obtain between the behavior of atoms at the apple’s surface and the behavior of light-sensitive cells in Bob’s retinas, and those that obtain between the behavior of these cells and neural firing patterns in Bob’s visual cortex.

• Type II is exemplified by the correlations that obtain between neural firing patterns in Bob’s visual cortex and Bob’s perceptual experience of a green apple.

• Type III is exemplified by certain correlations that exist in the experience of our neuroscientist Alice, to wit: her perception of a green apple situated in front of Bob and her perception of a specific firing pattern in Bob’s visual cortex.

• Type IV is exemplified by the correlations that obtain between the respective perceptual experiences of Alice and Bob, such as when they perceive what they take to be the same green apple.

Even though the correlations of Type I belong to physics, the general theoretical framework of contemporary physics (i.e., quantum mechanics) lacks the means to causally explain how they work. Quantum mechanics allows us to calculate and predict them, but that’s all. Moreover, what is characteristic of the events that quantum mechanics serves to correlate is that they are indicative of measurement outcomes, and nothing can be indicated in the absence of a conscious observer to whom it is indicated. In other words, quantum mechanics correlates experiences. Whereas these experiences must be describable in the realist language of classical discourse (i.e., in terms of objects that interact and change in accordance with causal laws), the correlations between them cannot be so described, and this is why quantum mechanics entails the distinction between a “classical” and a “quantum” domain.

While the quantum-mechanical correlations cannot be explained in causal terms, it is possible to understand why — to what end — they have the particular form that they do. For the most part, they are entailed by the existence of a world that allows itself to be described in the realist language of classical discourse.¹¹

In the Aurobindonian framework of thought, a couple of observations can be added. First, since the Force at work in the world is an infinite force working under self-imposed constraints — see here and here — it would be superfluous to invoke a physical process to explain its working. What needs to be explained is only why — for what purpose — it works under constraints, and why the constraints are just so. The purpose for which it works under the constraints that it does is to set the stage for the drama of evolution.

And second, what is manifesting our evolving world is an indivisible Reality beyond time and space. We must, accordingly, distinguish between two kinds of causality, the causality that links events within the manifested world, across time and space, and a causality that links the manifested world to its origin beyond time and space. As there is but one ultimate constituent, so there is but one ultimate cause, and this is why it would be superfluous to invoke anything physical (particles or waves) that mediates between the correlated events. If a medium is needed, it is that single ultimate cause of all physical events.

Turning to the correlations of Type II — such as obtain between Bob’s experiences and neural firing patterns in his brain — we find that they are as unintelligible as the brute fact that there is anything, rather than nothing at all. (Addressing the questions of how a material object can have conscious perceptions, and how there can be conscious perceptions of material objects, the philosopher Jerry Fodor¹² began by saying: “I can tell you the situation in respect of the first question straight off. Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea about how anything material could be conscious. So much for the philosophy of consciousness.”)

While the correlations of Type III — exemplified by the correspondence between (i) Alice’s perception of a green apple situated in front of Bob and (ii) her perception of a specific neural firing pattern in Bob’s brain — obtain between experiences enjoyed by the same person, the correlations of Type IV obtain between experiences enjoyed by different persons. Both types of correlation are established through communication. Those of Type IV are established when Alice and Bob agree that they are perceiving the same green apple, and those of Type III are established when Alice infers from this agreement that her perception of a specific neural firing pattern in Bob’s brain corresponds not only to her own experience of a green apple but also to Bob’s.

There remains the question of how it is that Alice’s perceptions agree with Bob’s (to the extent they do). This takes us back to Schrödinger’s astonishment at this agreement¹³:

because each person’s sense-world is strictly private and not directly accessible to anyone else, this agreement is strange.... Many people prefer to ignore or gloss over the strangeness of it, explaining the agreement by the existence of a real world of bodies which are the causes of sense-impressions and produce roughly the same impression on everybody. But this is not to give an explanation at all; it is simply to state the matter in different words.

Since we have no way of comparing our respective sense-worlds with this hypothetical real world, we cannot explain the similarity between our sense-worlds by invoking their similarity to the latter. Schrödinger’s solution was that “we are all really only various aspects of the One.” But this is only part of the solution. The hypothesis that you and I are aspects of the same (ultimate) subject does not fully explain how we both come to perceive the same object (albeit from different vantage points). Another part of the solution is that the things we perceive are all aspects of the same (ultimate) object, which has set the stage for the drama of evolution by entering into reflexive spatial relations. Yet another part of the solution is the (ultimate) identity of that ultimate subject with this ultimate object. In order to truly understand the relation between a perceiving subject and a perceived object (as far as that is possible), we need to address the question of how these two ultimates become effectively distinct. And to this end we must reconsider the sequence of self-modifications of Sachchidananda which led to the creation of the material universe.

In the original status of Sachchidananda’s creative self-knowledge, the knower is one with the known. In a secondary status, Sachchidananda adopts a multitude of cognitive/determinative standpoints within the world it creates, and knowledge by identity takes the form of direct knowledge as a result: each individual conscious being knows the others directly, without mediating representations. It is in this secondary status that the distantiating viewpoint of a perspectival consciousness like ours comes into being. Concurrently, the dichotomy between subject and object becomes a reality.

Consciousness as we know it appears to depend on representations. The need for representations arises in a third status of Sachchidananda’s creative self-knowledge, in which the subject identifies itself with each individual to the exclusion of all others. As a result, the knowledge (of others) takes the form of an indirect knowledge. An indirect knowledge involves two stages, a stage by which the individual subject is in direct contact with some of its objective attributes, which serve as representations of external objects, and a stage by which external objects give rise to representations. There are then two kinds of external objects, those which give rise to representations in the individual, and those which are experienced as external by the individual. The green apple (perceived by both Alice and Bob) and the corresponding firing pattern in Bob’s brain (observed by Alice) are both of the latter kind.

It is customary to think of representations as encodings. The common idea is that our brains extract information from the images falling on our retinas and encode the same in patterns of electrochemical pulses. Leaving aside for the moment the question of who or what decodes these patterns, this idea conflates two kind of retinal images, one that is empirically accessible and one that is not. The retinal image that an ophthalmologist may examine is of the same kind as the neural firing pattern that Alice observes. It corresponds to the object perceived by the ophthalmologist’s patient in the same way that the neural firing pattern observed by Alice corresponds to the green apple perceived by Bob. It is the projection of a perceived object onto to the perceiver’s retina and further outward into his externalized visual world. The retinal image of the other (hypothetical) kind is the projection of an external object onto the retina and further inward into the perceiver’s visual cortex.

Turning now to the question concerning the decoder, it can be argued (as I did) that rendering the encoded information as a world extended in space, a world containing objects which change and perdure — not to mention qualia — requires information that neural firing patterns cannot provide. The following passage by Sri Aurobindo is relevant here:

what we get by our sense is not the inner or intimate touch of the thing itself, but an image of it or a vibration or nerve message in ourselves through which we have to learn to know it. These means are so ineffective, so exiguous in their poverty that, if that were the whole machinery, we could know little or nothing or only achieve a great blur of confusion. But there intervenes a sense-mind intuition which seizes the suggestion of the image or vibration and equates it with the object, a vital intuition which seizes the energy or figure of power of the object through another kind of vibration created by the sense contact, and an intuition of the perceptive mind which at once forms a right idea of the object from all this evidence. [LD 547–548]

The origin of these several kinds of intuition is to be found in a direct knowledge, a knowledge which is subliminal to the consciousness that has evolved thus far. The efficacy of the subliminal input to our surface cognition, however, should not be overstated. There is a cost to the exclusive identification of consciousness with each individual, which prevents the subliminal consciousness from delivering to the surface a more or less faithful copy of its direct knowledge. (If the identification were not exclusive, knowledge would still be direct, and the consciousness in each individual would not even be divided into a subliminal and a surface part.) A separative consciousness restricts the flow of knowledge in two ways: there is a semi-transparent wall between the subliminal and the surface (transparent to the subliminal but opaque to the surface), and there is a somewhat less opaque wall between the surface consciousness and the world external to the individual. Sri Aurobindo continues:

If the first composite intuition were the result of a direct contact or if it summarised the action of a total intuitive mentality master of its perceptions, there would be no need for the intervention of the reason except as a discoverer or organiser of knowledge not conveyed by the sense and its suggestions: it is, on the contrary, an intuition working on an image, a sense document, an indirect evidence, not working upon a direct contact of consciousness with the object. But since the image or vibration is a defective and summary documentation and the intuition itself limited and communicated through an obscure medium, acting in a blind light, the accuracy of our intuitional interpretative construction of the object is open to question or at least likely to be incomplete. Man has had perforce to develop his reason in order to make up for the deficiencies of his sense instrumentation, the fallibility of his physical mind’s perceptions and the paucity of its interpretation of its data.

Our world-knowledge is therefore a difficult structure made up of the imperfect documentation of the sense image, an intuitional interpretation of it by perceptive mind, life-mind and sense-mind, and a supplementary filling up, correction, addition of supplementary knowledge, co-ordination, by the reason. Even so our knowledge of the world we live in is narrow and imperfect, our interpretations of its significances doubtful: imagination, speculation, reflection, impartial weighing and reasoning, inference, measurement, testing, a further correction and amplification of sense evidence by Science,—all this apparatus had to be called in to complete the incompleteness. [LD 548]

Humble comment by Yours Truly: while science has had its impressive and undeniable successes, in the more than eight decades since this was written, it has also brought into stark relief much that we actually don’t know or understand. Hence, the following still applies.

After all that the result still remains a half-certain, half-dubious accumulation of acquired indirect knowledge, a mass of significant images and ideative representations, abstract thought counters, hypotheses, theories, generalisations, but also with all that a mass of doubts and a never-ending debate and inquiry. Power has come with knowledge, but our imperfection of knowledge leaves us without any idea of the true use of the power, even of the aim towards which our utilisation of knowledge and power should be turned and made effective. This is worsened by the imperfection of our self-knowledge which, such as it is, meagre and pitifully insufficient, is of our surface only, of our apparent phenomenal self and nature and not of our true self and the true meaning of our existence. Self-knowledge and self-mastery are wanting in the user, wisdom and right will in his use of world-power and world-knowledge. [LD 548–549]

1. J.R. Searle, Mind: A Brief Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2004).

2. B. Falkenburg, Particle Metaphysics: A Critical Account of Subatomic Reality, pp. 339–340 (Springer, 2007).

3. J.R. Searle, Intentionality, p. 15 (Cambridge University Press, 1983).

4. J.R. Searle, It upsets me when I read the nonsense written by my contemporaries, New Philosopher, 25 January 2014 (URL).

5. J.R. Searle, The Mystery of Consciousness, p. 8 (A New York Review Book, 1997).

6. Loc. cit. p. 193.

7. K. Popper and J. Eccles, The Self and Its Brain, pp. 96–97 (Springer International, 1977).

8. H. Putnam, The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body, and World, p. 173 (Columbia University Press, 1999).

9. P.F. Strawson, Philosophical Writings, pp. 125–145 (Oxford University Press, 2011).

10. H. Putnam, The Many Faces of Realism (Open Court, 1987).

11. U. Mohrhoff, Why the laws of physics are just so, Foundations of Physics 32, 1313–1324 (2002); Quantum mechanics explained, International Journal of Quantum Information 7, 435–458 (2009); The World According to Quantum Mechanics: Why the Laws of Physics Make Perfect Sense After All, 2nd Edition, Chapter 25 (World Scientific, 2018).

12. J. Fodor, The big idea: can there be a science of mind?, Times Literary Supplement, 3 July 1992.

13. E. Schrödinger, What is real? In: My View of the World (Cambridge University Press, 1964).